Microsoft virtualization

David Davis on Hyper-V 3 – Live at TechEd 2012

At Microsoft’s yearly North American conference – TechEd 2012 – major new versions of Microsoft’s virtualization and cloud products were announced. Hyper-V, Microsoft’s type-1 hypervisor, typically installed as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 has received a long list of new features and is now called Hyper-V 3, found in Windows Server 2012.

Additionally, Microsoft’s IaaS cloud solution and datacenter systems management solution – System Center – has been updated to System Center 2012. Neither of these have been officially released but are available now in release candidate (RC) form for free download until the GA appears.

In my TechEd interview video, I talk about just some of the many new features found in Hyper-V 3. Some of the coolest announcements related to Hyper-V 3, in my opinion, are:

Vastly increased scalability including the ability to support up to 320 logical processors (cores), 4TB of phsyical memory, 2048 virtual CPUs per host, 64 virtual CPUs per VM, 1TB of memory per VM, 1024 active VMs per host, 64 hosts per cluster, and 4000 VMs per cluster.

Storage updates including the support for virtual fibre channel, 64TB virtual hard disks (VHDX), and offload data transfer, or ODX, while must be supported by your storage array

New security features and an extensible virtual switch that can be extended by partners

Shared-Nothing live migration that allows you to migrate virtual machines from one host to another without any shared storage (NAS or SAN) in-between

Live storage migration and live migration, with no limits, built into every version of Hyper-V

A new 100% free version of Hyper-V that supports ALL new features (note that there is no GUI on the console and no multi-host management but you can initiate advanced features like live migration and advanced live migration FREE using Hyper-V Manager installed on your desktop or laptop computer

A free vSphere to Hyper-V converter that takes care of removing the VMware Tools and adding the Hyper-V integrations, automating the conversion process

Microsoft openly admitted (even in the keynote) that their aim is to “give VMware a run for their money”. So, it will be very interesting to see how the virtualization market changes, over time, with the release of Hyper-V 3.